Monthly Archives: June 2013

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When there is an embarrassing leak, as inevitably there must be, the government has a very predictable response. They change the subject and go to a meta-issue. When caught snooping, spying and lying they refuse to deal with the substance of the allegations against them. Their behavior or misbehavior can’t be responded to for reasons of security, they assert. Well, it’s true if you parse it right. The security they reference is their job security and seldom our national security.

Remember when our bombing and invasion, oh sorry, I mean “incursion” into Cambodia was a national security secret? We were not supposed to know. Yet the Cambodians who were being bombed must have noticed the bombs. Yes, even the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong knew about this. The secret was to be kept not from our enemies but from us.

We obviously believe, perhaps correctly, that the best defense when getting caught doing something embarrassing is to attack the leaker and his loyalty, sanity and sexuality. We go ad homonym and distract the public from our transgressions and the real issues with meta-issues. Our media go along with the distraction. Is Julian Assange a sexual predator who lied about using a condom? Is Private 1st Class Bradley Manning a homosexual? Today’s conversation is focused on the not important question: Is Ed Snowden a hero or a traitor?

NSA Director James Clapper talks about Snowden and getting him. He does not speak about his perjurious testimony in front of Congress when he denied (under oath) that NSA was monitoring our communications on a massive scale. He was asked if the National Security Agency collects “any type of data at all on millions of Americans.” Clapper responded, “No, sir.” Maybe the question should be if Director Clapper is a hero or a traitor? No, that too is a meta-question.*

We are supposed to believe our government about the great need for these programs and the clear boundaries that make them safe, when they are consistently deceptive about what they are doing. They are deceptive actively and passively—being unforthcoming and actually lying. How could this build our confidence in their judgment and credibility? They tell us that they know what they’re doing and that we can trust them. Why should we? If they were our children, we’d damn well take the car keys away. To earn our trust, they must deal with substance and tell the truth.

Has our government waived its expectation of privacy? While today we debate what we in the public have so passively given up, is loss of privacy a two-way street?

We’ve lost all our rights to privacy. It’s as if the Fourth Amendment didn’t exist. We didn’t give our informed consent to surrender our rights. We just let it happen.

We’re all aware of this issue because of the mission creep of our intelligence gathering post 9-11 and the Patriot Act. Out of fear, we cried, “Protect us. Do anything in order to connect the dots.” We didn’t realize we’re all dots. We also didn’t dream of the reach of technology and its ability to go deep into our lives and extract data.

Defenders of this insatiable desire for information, from both the left and right, hold that if we’re doing nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear. This implies that any desire for privacy is a confession of a guilty conscience.

Strangely, our government has no sense of either irony or humor when they fight to protect their secrets—which ironically enough are actually our secrets that they’re keeping for us and from us. They assert the right to know nearly everything, and we have the right to know virtually nothing. They believe that their operations, motives and techniques should remain secret.

They’re entitled to their beliefs, but they too have no reasonable expectation of privacy. The same technological sword with which they shred our rights cuts both ways.

Our intelligence apparatus is hemorrhaging secrets. Our government is maniacally pursuing Julian Assange of Wikileaks while prosecuting Private 1st Class Bradley Manning for leaking. Manning leaked a lot of documents, but none was top secret. Most were only “confidential” or “sensitive.” Frankly, it’s embarrassing that so much sensitive information was available to a low ranking person whose previous work experience was Starbucks. The information was mostly politically embarrassing. To the extent that the government argues how devastating the leaks are, they look terrible for having entrusted them to an inexperienced kid.

The release of PRISM and the fact that all our emails can be read, our social media monitored and all our electronic communications logged and mined is deeply embarrassing but not very compromising. Some of these leaks are “secret;” some may be “top secret.”

The government has two embarrassing problems. One is that the leaker isn‘t an employee of our government, neither an intelligence officer nor operative. Edward Snowden is a 29 year-old intelligence analyst working for a private contractor. It’s fair to wonder at the intelligence of our intelligence structure if we are sub-contracting analysis to young civilians. Why are we giving access to reliably unreliable young folks? The answer is pretty simple. It seems a bit more secure than outsourcing to Bangladesh.

The second problem is that our intelligence network is vast. The amount of data we are collecting reaches over a billion phone calls every day. Add the emails, the iChats and the mechanics of sorting and analyzing and the data are nearly incomprehensible. Finding enough reliable analysts is clearly impossible. We have over a million people with clearance to access secret and top-secret files. I wonder how many intelligence analysts it might take to keep track of the other intelligence analysts?

Add to this “Secrecy Inflation.” Secret is a very low status classification. People use red stamps spelling SECRET just to get a document read. Anything unstamped has a high likelihood of being ignored. Top secret isn’t much higher. This is where access just begins to be restricted and we enter an alphabet soup land of restricted codes.

What Manning and Snowden leaked is more embarrassing than damaging to the nation. The leaks impact the prestige of the government not the nation’s true security.

With over a million Americans having access to secret and top secret documents, our government has even less of a legitimate expectation of privacy than we ourselves.

I remember the exact moment when I knew that the Soviet Union was doomed and would inevitably collapse. It was 1966 and I was in Moscow, sitting in a friend’s room in the Peking Hotel. As young students, we were talking trash and were neither entirely sober nor coherent. As we spoke, our guide whom we had come to like and, maybe foolishly, trust, shook her head and pointed to the light fixture hanging from the ceiling. She was clearly signaling us that we were being bugged.

I could understand and appreciate the training our guides had in English. They had American English-speaking guides and British-speaking guides. They were fluent not simply in the languages and accents, but also in our colloquialisms and slang. Tourists were valuable for our hard currency. But to listen to us, to have dedicated the resources to recording and translating our immature, often slurred and banal, conversations was, in my mind, a huge misallocation of resources. Their fear and obsession with intelligence told me, in one instant epiphany, that they could not survive.

Now, we learn that we are monitoring and logging every phone call, every email, every iChat, FaceTime and Skype “in every Middlesex, village and farm.” We “country folks should be up and to arms.” This is an egregious over-reach in the name of security that further eats away at our Fourth Amendment right to be secure in our person and property and not subject to search and seizure without either warrant or probable cause. The data mining that gathers every conversation and contact is intrusive, clearly without probable cause and should be deemed illegal, and unconstitutional.

Yes, I know it’s all done in the name of protecting us from terrorism. But no army ever has enough weapons. No intelligence service ever has enough tools. They always want more, and, if there is an attack or loss, it becomes the victim’s fault for not providing that one last gun, plane, missile or microphone that would have made all the difference. Nonsense. We have been doing this data mining, dragging our purse-seine nets through all communications for four years, and Boston Marathon still happened. We had the logs of the family calls between Massachusetts and Dagestan. But we didn’t know what they meant. We mined the data but could not refine it.

There is no perfect security and the paradox of intelligence is that the more we gather, the less likely we’ll be able to discern the important information. Our terrorist watch lists are now so large that they have become impractical. We may know everything but understand little. If everyone is on the list, then the list is of little value.

As a personal example: I am not an orderly person. I don’t like filing. Yet I know, with absolute certainty, where every important document, every piece of writing, every article and receipt is filed. Yes, truly. They are all in the “Miscellany” file. Not really that helpful, is it? Just like the data we’ve dragged from our communications–both domestic and foreign.

There’s no question that we face real dangers. There are people who want to hurt us, and we must know that there is no perfect security. We’re always balancing risks and gains, asking how much privacy to trade for protection and how much money we should spend to meet our challenges. Yet, “We the People” are not really being either consulted or informed. And if you don’t inform us, if all we know is from leaks, then it’s difficult to render informed consent to what we’re doing and what it’s costing us in treasure and in freedom.

Perfect safety for an individual means a most imperfect life–not driving, flying, traveling, playing or making love–or even loving. Staying still and locking ourselves up in physical and spiritual armor is not living. We are a part of an interesting, beautiful, complex and dangerous world. To live is to risk–but we should have some way of calculating risks and benefits, and this has to involve information, good and credible information.

Conservatives bent on killing Obama Care found a strong ally in Obama’s Sec. of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. Scoring an own goal against the administration, Sec. Sebelius, in one short session before Congress, gave a lethal weapon to those who would kill Obama Care. She demonstrated everything that conservatives fear in bureaucracies and in bureaucrats by essentially becoming a death panel of one.

Sarah Murnaghan is ten years old and has Cystic Fibrosis. She is weak. Her breathing is compromised and she will not live without a lung transplant. Her lungs fill with mucus and eventually and rapidly she will not simply die but die unpleasantly.

Part of the tragedy—hers and ours—is that she is potentially savable. No, it’s not a sure thing. Surgery, particularly transplant surgery, has risks. But when weighing risk against certainties, this is a no-brainer. Well, Sec. Sebelius has a brain, but no evidence of either a heart or real wisdom.

The rules, called in bureaucratese “protocols,” say that a child under 12 cannot have an adult lung transplant. Her doctors believe she is a good candidate for one, even at only 10. However, it is not up to her doctors. It is up to the rules, er, I mean protocols. And rules must be followed—blind to situation, opportunity or compassion.

Rules are, of course, broken all the time. The government waives protocols when it wants to. However, Sec. Sebelius, in a truly astonishing and damaging performance, embodied all that folks hate about bureaucracies. She was asked if she could do anything about this by a congressman, who is also a doctor, and she admitted that she was willing to “review the policy.” Great. Sarah has three to five weeks to live and a review of a federal policy will take how long? Clearly beyond Sarah’s life expectancy and maybe Sebelius’ time in office.

This should be the Turkish Century. Turkey has everything it needs to lead the way, to become the new center, the greatest power in its region. Turkey has culture. It has educational infrastructure. Most importantly, it has Location. Location and Location!

The center of gravity of the Middle East has moved north. With Egypt an economic and political basket case, with Jordan becoming unstable, with Lebanon in chaos and Syria both imploding and exploding at the same time, there are only three viable candidates to pick up the Sword of Saladin.

One is Saudi Arabia, but it is undergoing a crisis of leadership and, as the value of oil declines in a greener world, they will have decades of problems. The second nation with great regional ambitions and the ability to project influence and power is Iran. They too have some great assets: History, education, culture and ambition. Their great impediment is a combination of Shiah religious zealotry and nationalistic hegemonic ambition that involves it in a death match with the largely Sunni Arab World.

Today, Saudi Arabia and Iran contend with surrogates in Syria. The Saudis are supporting the insurgents while the Iranians are arming and training both the Alawite Shiahs of Assad and Lebanese Hezbollah. Syria could well become Iran’s Vietnam, or Saudi Arabia’s Afghanistan. Perhaps both. It is easily foreseeable that both nations will deplete their money, blood and morale. This, along with the greatly lessened value of the Suez Canal, makes the smart money looks north towards Turkey.

Turkey had sought membership in the EU. Turkey is a member of NATO. Turkey wants to host the Olympics. Turkey “coulda been a contender.” But the EU, even before the economic crisis, was not eager to welcome 70 million Muslims into Europe. As Europe stalled and created unmeetable conditions, Turkey slowly moved its gaze from west to east, from Europe to the Middle East. It became ever more Islamist, imposed stricter Muslim social codes and broke up an historic semi-pseudo-almost friendly relationship with Israel.

Wanting to assert both influence and wisdom, their Prime Minister, Erdogan, gave out good advice to Mubarak in the early days of the Arab Spring. He warned Mubarak to listen to his people and react with understanding and tolerance. Mubarak didn’t listen and he fell, both personally and his entire regime. When peaceful protestors filled the streets of Damascus and Deraa in Syria, Erdogan counseled Assad not to react with disproportionate force but to listen to the voices of his people. Assad didn’t listen and managed to turn a limited protest into a rebellion, which descended into civil war and now is a nearly region wide war between the Sunnis and Shiahs.

So when protestors filled the streets in Istanbul protesting, at least on the surface, the removal of a park for a Mosque, Erdogan should have listened to himself and followed his own good advice. Naturally, he did no such thing. He sent in poorly trained police who immediately went for the tear gas, the water canons and the truncheons. He automatically characterized protestors as unpatriotic, as anti-Turk, as being under the influence of foreigners and just plain traitors. He did everything he told the already deposed dictators not to do.

Still, he claimed he was not a dictator. This claim is based on the rationale that since he was elected in a democratic manner, he could do anything he wants. This is not my understanding of democracy, but we’ll see. He wants the Olympics. Probably not a good bet. He wants to silence protestors. This is difficult to imagine when you have long-time adversaries marching together–like Sunnis and Shiahs and Kurds (Oh my!).

Jonathan disappointingly joined the noisy pack that has clamored for Attorney General Eric Holder’s scalp. That’s not company I’m sure Jonathan really wants to keep. What company is that, and why? Start with the uber-conservative Washington Times. It asked in a poll question, “ Will Holder be forced to resign in six months.” The percentage of votes for yes was lopsided. The poll may have been more wishful longing than merely an objective gauge of public opinion about Holder.

At the very least, it spoke to something that has been near and dear to conservatives virtually from the moment that President Obama announced his intention to nominate Holder for Attorney General in 2008. That something is to convert Holder into the whipping boy for all the GOP’s manufactured alleged sins of the Obama administration. Then once he has served that end, to try and force Obama to dump him, and point to that as example of a president with a penchant for getting a top cabinet official to do the administration’s dirty work.

Holder is an all-purpose tool in the GOP’s relentless drive to mark Obama as a failed president. The call for Holder’s resignation fits perfectly into their scheme.
Each time the GOP saber rattles Holder with talk of contempt convictions, lawsuits against him, demands for his firing, or resignation, a perjury investigation, and even threats to start impeachment proceedings against him. Typing Holder as the fount of secrecy, manipulation and wrongdoing in the Obama administration will be played and replayed in the run up to the 2014 elections. The aim will be to paint Holder as an incompetent, conniving political hack who supposedly typifies the poor and untrustworthy judgment of Obama in picking his political appointees.

The GOP’s dogged vow to hamstring Obama with the odor of scandal and in effect straightjacket his presidency insures that Holder will continue to serve as a red herring to toss more mud on Obama and hope that it sticks. It won’t. Sorry, Jonathan, Holder must stay.

Eric Holder must go. However, if he resigns now, it will be processed as a political defeat for Obama and a victory for the forces of obstruction and Darrel Issa. And while I understand not caving in to the irrational pressure from the right, there are substantive reasons for Holder to go.

It’s true that the right has been looking for a reason to chase him out of office. They’ve grasped at straws, and then mixing them with mud, made bricks to hurl at him. It’s also true that Holder has served as a surrogate for attacks on Obama. In that, he has played a useful role. Most of the attacks failed to connect, finding no real scandals because there were no real scandals.

However, now in the cases of both the IRS and the media subpoenas, Holder is caught in a double bind. Either he knew what was going on and signed off on it and therefore committed breaches of faith (if not law) or he knows nothing about major policies that are in his portfolio and is therefore incompetent. This isn’t a good situation for him or, more importantly, for Obama’s second term agenda.

While the IRS story is more damaging politically, since everyone fears their capricious and arbitrary power, the Constitutionally graver issue is the persecution, and potential prosecution of media people. Since the public holds most of the media in about the same regard as the IRS, this in theory should be easier for him to weather. But it won’t be. The media can control the narrative, and when the New York Times and Fox are in agreement, there’s a powerful, if transient, alliance.

Holder testified under oath that he knew nothing about any potential indictment of any media figure, yet personally signed the affidavit requesting a warrant that asserted probable cause to believe a reporter was a co-conspirator under an espionage statute. Holder is caught in a terrible and damaging, if not damning, conundrum. He has sworn under oath two very different things concerning the same facts.

The elegant rationale offered by his underlings, even if true, will not help him. Whether guilty of malfeasance or nonfeasance, he needs to get out of the way of Obama’s plans. He’s no longer useful as a distraction or surrogate. It’s time to do the honorable thing and leave.

The recent Quinnipiac University poll on likely 2016 presidential candidates seemingly had some good news for the GOP and bad news for thousands of Democrats. The poll found that Hillary Clinton’s popularity had nose-dived nearly 10 percent in the past few months. The poll even gave Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush backers some hope. In a head to head match up with Clinton they were in striking range of her in vote comparisons.
This is heady stuff for two rumored GOP presidential candidates who were widely viewed as candidates with too little national appeal, too on the fringe politically and one, too straight jacketed with the name Bush. The only other Democrat mentioned as a possible 2016 presidential candidate was Vice President Joe Biden. His rating plunge was high speed downward. So much so that Paul and Bush in a hypothetical match up would trounce him.
Clinton’s popularity drop was not much of a surprise for reasons that tell much about the GOP and Hillary. The GOP zeroed in on her in a clumsily designed stealth campaign long ago with one aim, and that was to knock her out the box as a viable presidential candidate in any season. The campaign began during Hillary’s years in the White House with then President Bill Clinton. The attacks from Whitewater to the Lewinsky scandal on Bill as well as in the carping, digs, and finger pointing, and investigations of and at him, Hillary’s name was often as prominently mentioned as Bill’s. The aim was to implant in the voting public’s mind that Hillary was a co-partner, even co-conspirator, in the alleged wrong doings the GOP tried to pin on Clinton. This was done with a long range eye on a future Clinton presidential candidacy.
The hits on her accelerated when she tossed her hat in the presidential ring in 2008. The GOP dredged up all their old manufactured Clinton dirt. Some thought that this would make her an easy mark if she won the Democratic presidential nomination that year. But other party insiders thought the opposite. That is that Clinton would have been even more formidable than Obama primarily because of her appeal to women and the blue collar Democrats who had doubts and ambivalence about voting for an African-American presidential candidate. Obama’s win didn’t totally dispel that fear. He still did poorly among white male, blue collar voters in the several win swing states. This was the case again in his reelection win in 2012. The women and white male blue collar voters in those states are still crucial to a Democratic presidential candidates’ White House success.
There’s more, though, to the GOP’s worry about Clinton than her appeal to two key voting blocs. The more is Hillary. Millions still have a deep respect, admiration, and appreciation for her tireless work as a women’s rights advocate, her fight for health care reform, civil rights, and international diplomacy. Before the Democratic Party leadership and much of the media abandoned her in 2008, she was the clear presidential choice of most rank and file Democrats and millions of voters who spanned all racial and ethnic lines. Despite being outgunned and out spent during the primary campaign war with Obama, she still retained much of that support.

Her positions on health care and corporate reform, her mea culpa for her early support of the Iraq war and willingness to oppose it later, her experience in international relations, and her hands on administrative experience in White House policy affairs insured the allegiance of millions of voters to her. She was then the one sure Democrat who could beat any GOP contender, and hit the ground running once in office. Millions of women also saw Hillary as the gender Obama. Her presidency would have marked a historic presidential breakthrough for women. She would have been a role model and inspiration for millions of women young and old. She would have proven that women can hold the world’s top political power spot and govern as well if not better than a man. Her administration would have been savvy, moderate, and capable of skillfully navigating and winning the blood battles with Congress.
President Obama recognized Clinton’s prodigious ability and the experience that she would bring to any administration post. She proved invaluable as his Secretary of State in shoring up his then paper thin resume on foreign policy issues. During her tenure at the State Department, Hillary maintained a steady but quiet profile, as the voice for Obama administration foreign policy.
She was not forgotten by the GOP, though. There was little doubt the first chance it got it would seize on a real or manufactured Obama foreign policy flub and make her their hard target. Benghazi proved to be the alleged flub and the GOP pounced. The aim as always was to embarrass and discredit her not because of her alleged missteps as Secretary of State, but as a 2016 presidential candidate.
This proved again that Clinton is the one Democrat most feared by the GOP in 2016. And with good reason, if she runs she can win. That’s why the GOP’s Hillary hits won’t end.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new ebook is America on Trial: The Slaying of Trayvon Martin (Amazon). He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson